Anna Lowell Woodbury a lady discovered who is among the forgotten ~ Anna Lowell Woodbury of Cambridge (9 August 1833~6 June 1909) founded one of the country’s first cooking schools – to instruct thousands of children of freed slaves the art of plain cooking – but she is largely forgotten to history. Woodbury published her “Lessons in Cookery” manual for Washington’s public schools in 1889, seven years before even Fannie Farmer’s “Boston Cooking-School Cook Book” went to print. Her family is well-recorded in Cambridge history, though she was shy of publicity and little has been written about her. Anna Lowell Woodbury was the niece of poet James Russell Lowell and the sister of Lt. James Jackson Lowell and Brig. Gen. Charles Russell Lowell, both killed in the Civil War. She was an anti-slavery activist, like many New England women, and volunteered as a nurse during the war. Her zeal to help freed slaves led her to found a vocational school in Cambridge and the cooking school in Washington. She was a pioneer in the industrial arts movement, as her work inspired the formation of the National Industrial Association. Her mission was to teach the basics of cooking with recipes that were attractive, interesting and useful. They can be found in “Lessons in Cookery” One lesson teaches how to prepare beef tea and other food for the sick, about which Anna Lowell Woodbury knew a great deal. As a Civil War nurse in Washington, D.C., she was in charge of the special diet kitchen at Armory Square Hospital, an old hotel that stood at the where today is the National Air and Space Museum. Nursing wasn’t an established profession yet and women were only starting to work in military hospitals. “Nurse” was a term for the middle-and upper-class women who served. Anna Lowell’s fellow lady nurses included the niece of New Hampshire Sen. John P. Hale, and the daughter of a wealthy New York judge. They did many of the same chores as matrons, cooks and laundresses. They also administered “medicines and stimulants” and made sure the patients in bed had enough books to read, according to the Armory order book in the National Library of Medicine. After the war Anna Lowell returned to Cambridge, where she founded the Howard Industrial School for Colored Women and Girls. General Charles Howard, then a Freedman’s Bureau commissioner, had asked for help finding work for the former slaves then crowded into Washington. The Bureau would send newly enfranchised women to Cambridge if there were a place for them. Lowell led a committee of Brahmins to found a school that would educate freed slaves in housekeeping and get them jobs. The school received 200 requests for domestic help before it opened its doors in a rented building at 585-587 Putnam Ave. in Cambridgeport. Most of the women didn’t stay long for job training, preferring to work right away, according to The Newetowne Chronicle. In 1868 Anna Lowell married a prominent D.C. physician, Henry E. Woodbury, They separated after two years. When he died in 1905, Woodbury left Anna $10 from his estate valued at $40,000. Estranged from her husband, Anna Lowell Woodbury decided to train the children of freed slaves in the domestic arts. As the Boston Transcript reported on June 13, 1898, “Their girls were growing up without the restraints and the instruction of the slave regime and the new civilizing tendencies had not become operative.” Through today’s eyes, the idea of a wealthy white women teaching African-American children to be servants seems at best condescending. But the Post-Civil War Era offered few opportunities for ex-slaves, and African-American leaders like Booker T. Washington saw training for the jobs available as a necessary survival tactic. By her own account and newspaper reports, Mrs. Woodbury opened the first mission school of cooking in the face of great opposition. Cookery schools, she said, were viewed with great distrust, but perhaps it was teaching African-American children that did not go over well in that southern city. Around 1880, she rented a plain three-story brick house 1228 N St with a velvety lawn and the words “School of Cookery” on the western façade. That first year, the school taught 12 girls plain cooking and the elements of good housekeeping, while “trying to elevate their intellectual and moral standards,” the Transcript reported. It cost $10-$15 a year to teach each student, but tuition was free. Mrs. Woodbury herself quietly financed the school, with help from renters on the upper floors, donations from Bostonians, paid classes for advanced students and the sale of cakes and breads from the school’s ovens. The Boston Evening Transcript carried a story about the school on June 13, 1898: “It is doubtful if the list of endeavors made to elevate the lives of the poor and the unfortunate contains the record of any institution which accomplishes more in proportion to its means than Mrs. Anna Lowell Woodbury’s modestly termed “School of Cookery”.” Women were also taught how to teach cooking in the public schools. By 1888, the School of Cookery and its teachers were teaching 900 students. News of her work spread, and Mrs. Woodbury received letters inquiring about it from all over the country. That interest inspired the formation of the National Industrial Association, founded during a meeting at her home in Washington. She became the NIA’s acting president. The first annual meeting was held in Washington in April 1888. The NIA was among the earliest, if not the earliest, associations founded in the United States for the promotion of industrial education. In 1889, Anna Lowell Woodbury published the cooking manual used in D.C. public schools. The manual starts with instructions on how to make a fire and a recipe for Tip-Top biscuits “to show the pupils how to mix and handle dough lightly and quickly.” A recipe for sugar cookies follows a lesson on blacking a stove. Like the late chef, Julia Child, Mrs. Woodbury – probably unintentionally – also spread a new style of cooking. Though her students were from the South, the “Lessons in Cookery” taught them New England-style cooking, with recipes for Boston brown bread, New Bedford pudding and codfish balls. Learn more about Cambridge history by visiting the website of the Cambridge Historical Society. Anna Lowell Woodbury’s brothers are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark. Read Charles Russell Lowell’s biography by Carol Bundy. In Washington, D.C., the site of the Armory Square Hospital is now the National Air and Space Museum, just across the National Mall from Julia Child’s Cambridge kitchen in the National Museum of American History.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 00:50:23 +0000
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